According to that email Microsoft adheres to broadcast flags included in the video stream that limits the rights of the users on the receiving end. Windows Media Center users however will not be pleased to hear that software and hardware developers do not have any obligations to interpretate the broadcast flags at all but Microsoft apparently decided to side with the content distributors effectively turning against a part of their customer base.

EFF’s Danny O’Brien commented on the issue in a blog post at the Electronic Frontier Foundation website. (unfortunately slashdotted right now): “They’ve imposed restrictions way beyond what the law requires. Customers need to know who Microsoft is listening to and how that affects their equipment. Right now, the only way customers know what Microsoft has agreed to is when the technology they’ve bought suddenly stops working. Microsoft needs to come clean and tell its customers what deals it has made.’”

It is still unclear if NBC set the broadcast flag to test the waters or if it was an accident that was not supposed to be happening. The most interesting information of the whole incident is the fact that Windows Media Center follows the broadcast flags, that content distributors can regulate what viewers may or may not do with the content stream and that old hardware that was produced before hardware had to be broadcast-flag compliant was not affected at all.

They made it clear in their announcement that they expect that some things will go wrong, obviously live is something completely different than the prerecorded shows that they use to stream normally.

I’m not sure about this but I guess you need the latest client that was released yesterday to be able to take part in the live test. I definitely will tune in to see how the image quality will hold up against other services that stream live Internet. Another aspect that is quite interesting is the delay of the image compared to normal television. How many seconds will the stream be behind in the coverage ?

The first real test will be the live streaming of all NCAA basketball championships games starting next Thursday which will be available to users world wide which comes a little bit surprising if you consider how other Internet TV services (like Hulu) tend to ignore viewers from outside the United States.

The other good news is that there will only be in-stream ads which is only fair I guess if you consider it’s free and live. The Joost team is looking forward to this first large scale live test which could bring up related problems that are not foreseeable at the moment. I guess the best thing is to enjoy it while it lasts.

I think it is pretty exciting that Joost is finally starting to deliver live content which was always something that held them back in my opinion. From there the possibilities are endless, providing the software and service work as intended.

Image quality is quite good and you can view several country related and public tv stations. Since Zattoo is new in the UK I would like to list the TV stations that are currently UK exclusive, they are: Channel 4, BBC Three, BBC Four, BBC News 24, BBC Parliament, Cbeebies, CBBC and Channel 5, Community Channel and Information TV. The last three will start on March 12th.

Next to those exclusive channels viewers from all countries get access to the following TV stations: ABC Now, Al Jazeera Arabic,
Bloomberg UK, Canal 24 Horas, Deutsche Welle, EuroNews,France 24 English, France 24 French,SF Info, sumo.tv, TVE Internacional, TVP Polonia and Auto Moto, Poker Channel, Russia Today and Tele Züri. The last four becoming available on March 12th as well.

Picture quality is good but not good enough to view the stream in fullscreen. Another new feature is the EPG – Electronic Programming Guide which looks really nice and offers a good overview. Zattoo is free to download and run, so go grab a copy now if you are interested.

Sopcast is an alternative. You can download the freeware from the developers website or use one of the mirrors to do so. The download from the main website did not work for me, not a good sign, and I had to use one of the mirrors to get the program. Sopcast offers free tv streams over internet using P2P technique which means that the quality not only depends on the source who is streaming the tv signal but also on the peers that share their bandwidth as well.

A pleasant suprise was that the website was completely translated to English, which is not the case for most other Sopcast-like-tools out there. Once installed you can login anonymously and click on channels to see the big channel list.

Channels are sorted into categories like Sports and HiFi Music. As you can see on the picture to the left there are some characters that are not displayed correctly, most likely because of missing Chinese language support on my system.

Clicking on a channel opens a new window to the right of the program that is connected to it. You receive some basic information about buffering, speed and which program you are viewing.

It normally takes some time to load. Just remember that the quality of the output not only depends on your connection speed but also on the connection speed of your peers.

The tv stream playback began quickly but the buffering was not done yet. It is normal to get some small interruptions during the first minutes of playback. This should stop once you are connected to more peers.

Sopcast does not have that many US channels like TVU Player. It offers ESPN, HBO Movie and CNN. There are probably more at different times in the day and some minor ones that I missed but it’s rather mediocre.

All the football fans should also take note of CCTV 5 which is a Chinese Sports channel broadcasting lots of European football. (that is soccer in North America)

Conclusion: If you like sports you may want to try out Sopcast and won’t miss tvu player that much. If you like movies and tv shows sopcast is not really the right tv streaming application to use.

A week ago I introduced peekvid.com which offered lots of tv series as streams on the internet. Today channelbreak.com emerged which seems to be using the same source that peekvid.com is using. Both are streaming videos that are hosted by guba.com. And guba.com is finally a usenet provider with a service to offer usenet content on their website.

The funny thing is that I´am not able to find out how they finance their service. There seems to be no paid service whatsoever. You have to register at guba.com but that registration seems to be free. I tested it out and was able to register without problems. There is no sign of a subscription fee, the faq and the terms of service do speak of fees for premium content for example but there is nothing like that inside at the moment.

I´am still very cautious about this service, my advise would be to forget about signing up at guba.com. It looks suspicious to me ..

The quality of the episodes is real good, you don´t have a option for viewing it in full screen though but I was able to resize the window.

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All streams seem to run in Mediaplayer only which is unfortunate. I had no problems playing them in firefox though. (means Opera should work as well, not sure if linux users will be able to view them at all, maybe with a substitute). Some channels open in a new window that shows the actual movie and information about the station you are currently viewing.

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This is slighty complex but you should get used to the procedure. All you need is a http proxy that is hosted inside the USA and does not spill your IP address. To achieve this you need a application that checks proxy servers for those variables. I recommend Charon for this task but you could use other tools as well.

Download Charon from the website mentioned, you don´t need to install it at all, just extract the contents to a directory of your choice.

Fire it up, you have no proxy list yet so you could use google to find some lists or let charon do that for you. Simply select Check Proxies and then Scan Search Engines for new Proxies. Charon will find some proxies that are then displayed in the table. Those are unverified, now select Check Proxies and Check Anonymity of all Proxies. This might take some time. If you only recieve bad and timeouts you have to change one option in charon.

Select Connect Options and chose Use External Judge(s).

Let it test the proxies. If you have enough good ones or a finished test sort the proxies by the Country tab. Only USA proxies are working so we need one of those. The Anonymity tab should state YES. If both are correct right click the line and select Copy to clipboard and Copy selected IP:Port.

Open your browser and paste the proxy address into its proxy settings. For firefox you select Tools >> Options >> Connection Settings >> Manual Proxy Configuration and add the proxy and port there. Close the options and visit the abc streaming site. If you see a Launch button you are ready to enjoy the tv shows. If not try another proxy from the list.

I checked the service with this proxy and it worked flawlessly: 192.104.67.250 port:8080

Enjoy the shows.